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WaPo

The sequester: A moment of truth for the tea party?

Deep reductions in domestic and defense spending are set to begin Friday in a process known as sequestration, which will make progress toward the tea party’s goal of shrinking the government. What unfolds over the following months will be a high-stakes test of whether significant cuts in spending will help or hurt the economy — and the Republican Party’s brand…

“This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a tea party Republican elected in 2010…

Some Republicans say it’s risky for GOP lawmakers to celebrate deep spending cuts while warning of their potentially negative consequences.

“It’s going to be difficult for the Republicans as a party in this,” said Tony Fratto, a former adviser to President George W. Bush. “They said the sequester is bad. You can’t say that and then say it’s a good thing, a step in the right direction. It can’t be both bad and good.”

Blowback

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Deep reductions in domestic and defense spending are set to begin Friday in a process known as sequestration, which will make progress toward the tea party’s goal of shrinking the government. What unfolds over the following months will be a high-stakes test of whether significant cuts in spending will help or hurt the economy — and the Republican Party’s brand…

What a douche. These are simply reductions in increases of spending over the next decade. Supposed increase of $1.4 trillion is reduced to $1.3 over a decade. Yawn

Two inept parties boxed themselves into corners and came up with horrible solutions that doesn’t anyone.

Panther on February 26, 2013 at 8:00 PM

More likely the leaders of both parties knew exactly what would happen.

The Left could postpone a budget, again, and then use the sequester to keep the dependent class agitated. The WH is now posing as the defender of the victims of GOP cruelty

The leaders of the GOP in Congress could pretend they were chumped, and use the new ‘crisis’ as an excuse to ignore tea party demands.

Articles like this WAPO plant are being floated to set the Tea Party as the enemy of both the Left and the Right.

Meanwhile, it was the Tea Party members of the GOP who fought this deal.

Several Tea Party members caved after their private sequester meetings with the GOP leadership. Approximate last words by Thaddeus McCotter, after he exited his meeting with the GOP bigshots to support this dog: the Tea Party should grow up and the GOP should shut up

Or was it vice versa? I remember him scurrying to the cameras. Meanwhile, where is he now? His aides somehow submitted bogus ballot signatures, he dropped out of Congress, and he was trashed by the Club.

Allen West also bought the script, and he got gerrymandered out of his own district, by his own party.

As they say in the trade, two down

Notice Obama just freed the illegals, and the GOP lays off. Only swift amnesty could solve this horror.

Meanwhile, I noticed FOX online now has FOX News Latino, right next to Breitbart, and AOL at the bottom of the screen

Americans are sick and tired of yet another ginned-up crisis. D.C. needs to grow up, get to work, and live within its means. The real economic Armageddon looming before us is our runaway debt, not the sequester, which the President advocated for and signed into law and is now running around denouncing because he never had any genuine intention of reining in his reckless spending.

Remember that this sequestration deal came about because of the long debt ceiling standoff in the summer of 2011. It wasn’t the ideal outcome for anyone, but it did at least include real deficit reduction of about $110 billion per year for 10 years, which is still nowhere near enough to close our massive deficit. Keep in mind that since the sequester passed, the President has already hit American families and small business owners with his tax increases, or “more revenue” as he likes to call it. The American public doesn’t want tax increases; we want government to rein in its overspending.

If we can’t stomach modest cuts that would lower federal spending by a mere 0.3% per year out of a current federal budget of $3.6 trillion, then we might as well signal to the whole world that we have no serious intention of dealing with our debt problem.

If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.

If we ARE serious about putting our fiscal house in order, then let’s stop the hysterics, tighten our belts, and take our medicine.

I propose replacing those scary sequester “cuts” with a simple 10-year spending freeze that won’t cut important programs but will still eliminate the deficit.

JohnJ on February 26, 2013 at 7:56 PM

This just about completely blows Obama’s arguments out of the water – Why don’t the Repubs go with this simple message as it will reduce spending more than the sequestration (until we can get some real cuts in place)